Project Post-mortems Mindless Mismanagement of Agreement

Abstract

Researchers have described how IS adoptions can be mindful or mindless. This paper first describes the socio-psychological factors associated with mindful or mindless decision making by social actors. A conceptual model based on these factors is proposed to study mindful or mindless behaviours of software team members in (a) the firm-specific postmortems of projects incorporating traditional software development methods and (b) the project reviews on the adoption and use of an Agile approach to software development, which was introduced to address problems with the traditional approach to software development. The setting for the project post-mortems is a large US multinational telecommunications manufacturer based in Ireland. One significant factor that leads to mindless adoption behaviours, and which was identified by this study, is the Abilene Paradox. The findings of this paper illustrate how ineffective management of agreement (as opposed to disagreement) contributes to the existence of this paradox, the consequence of which affects the mindfulness of an adoption and review processes.